Seen on reddit and other sources:
https://old.reddit.com/r/fresno/comments/1hxqlx7/the_more_i_try_to_save_energy_the_higher_the/
Its already 50c or more per kilowatt hour… https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
On top of the “The Electric Home Rate Plan includes a $15-per-month Base Services Charge”… because people were starting to get 100% of their power from solar and it was “unfair”.
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Privately owned publicly enforced monopolies are rife with conflicts of interest. PG&E should be taken over by the state yesterday.
There are public utilities in the US. And yes, they offer better service and lower costs than the competing private utilities.
I didn’t know about the benefits until I moved somewhere served by them. I think we would have more of them if people could see the benefits, but unfortunately the utilities you have access to are limited by where you live.
Very yesterday.
It’s ridiculous that due to some old unique contract the city of San Mateo? Mountain View? (I forget) which is right in the heart of PG$E turf gets to set their own rates and they are less than a quarter of the price, for the same electricity from the same generators and wires. PG$E is such a horrible scam.
Which is worse, PG&E or SDG&E? Thankfully my house is all electric and solar powered so I get a refund from SDG&E every quarter for the excess energy I’m producing, so I don’t have much experience with them.
We took profit for decades from letting our infrastructure decay. Now we still want that same amount of profit, so you have to pay more for us to fix all the problems that should have been fixed with that profit money in the past.
And then eventually we’ll stop fixing it for that amount of money, pocket the difference and go “tough, pay more” if you want it fixed again.
The other issue is the impact renewable energy has on the grid. Most renewables are either on or off instead of having a spinning generator. Rotation of a physical generator adds a lot of stability and makes it easier to sync the phase of the power. With things like solar panels you need to have a station to sync the phases which adds more things to worry about.
That is only an issue in very small grids that are entirely renewables in one location. And the impact of AI on the grid has been much more problematic than any renewable sources because it’s localized and its is sudden spikes in usage whereas spikes in generation can be mitigated with battery and capacitor tech. Spikes at the usage side need to either be mitigated by the user or the grid has to implement mitigation at just those locations which is more difficult to plan for.
if solar was incentivized to have batteries, power factor correction, and (if the power companies can shut off the connection at the house during service to prevent backfeding) use frequency correcting inverters.
Electrical service should have a fixed connection fee.
The reason this happens is because electrical companies have two different kind of costs:
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Those related to obtaining the electrical power from generation companies.
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Those related to maintaining the grid and providing a connection.
In the past, normally what they did was to simply reduce this to a single price, and for that to be per unit of electricity used. That is, the consumer pays $N. That was at least not an entirely unreasonable approximation when people were pulling electricity off the grid.
The thing is, if a user mostly generates power locally, they still want to have that electrical connection and providing that connection still costs money. But now they’re also not paying for their share of the grid connectivity – it’s getting offloaded to the people who aren’t generating electricity locally.
Hence, the split that many utility companies are shifting to. There’s a fixed charge to have a connection to the grid, which covers the cost of grid maintenance. And there’s a separate cost per kWh of energy used.
If someone doesn’t care about the grid connection – like, they’re confident that they can handle their power needs locally, don’t care about having a grid connection, they do have the option to just drop service. But most people want to have the access to draw more power if they aren’t generating enough, so they want to retain their grid connection. With the grid connection fee being broken out, they cover their share of the costs.
Now, I’ve no disagreement that California electricity rates are pretty bonkers. They’re some of the highest in the US:
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
But the issue isn’t having a separate grid connection fee from an electricity used fee.
At least in Illinois, there is no option to go off grid. You’re legally required to maintain a grid connection even if you are generating all power locally.
This is roughly what we have in the UK.
For electricity, the standing charge is 61.6p/day, then 23.3p/kWh.
And gas is 29.6p/day, then 6.1p/kWh. (The numbers vary, and you can choose to lock rates for the duration of a contract).There has been some discussion of it in recent years (after it doubled, thanks Putin).
Whether it is fair for people using less energy…But in reality, everyone has similar 100 or 60A connections to the grid.
There are tarrifs for very low users, where the standing charge is combined with the first kWh.Once I’m off the gas boiler, and on a heat pump, I may get my gas disconnected to save the standing charge.
On a tangent, as you may be interested, we now have the option of flexible electricity pricing that tracks the wholesale rates for the day. Usually, it’s cheaper, sometimes even negative. Link.
However, this week there has been a lot of expensive energy, so it’s been butting up against the £1/kWh limit!70с/kWh is insane lolol
You do have to be careful here, because some localities actually require a grid connection to maintain a certificate of occupancy. Title 24 changed in recent years (here in CA), but you may still end up fighting your municipality and the POCO.
There’s certainly some reasonability to that. However, if the person decides to terminate service, maintaining the grid doesn’t become any cheaper for the power company. The lines are already installed, the connections made, and the company will continue to upkeep your connection all the way up to your home, even if it is terminated locally. They’ll do that just in case you or future homeowners no longer generate power and wish to continue service, and your neighbors will likely still be using it anyway. So by that same reasoning, maintaining a just-in-case service connection that you don’t typically need because you generate your own power also doesn’t result in increased maintenance costs to the power company. So there is also an argument to be made that that cost shouldn’t be pushed to them, but to the power drawers that the power company actually wants to serve anyway, the ones motivating them to build more grid in the first place.
Well, I suppose they could just take out the stretch of power line between me and my neighbors who use their service and cut down those maintenance costs altogether!
This isn’t like a driveway, it’s more like a road. It’s used by more people than the people whose property it’s in front of. And where I live, the property owner is considered to be the owner of the lines that extend from the grid to the home, so guess who already pays the maintenance costs on that?
The way we do it in New York city is that the power bill has two columns. Delivery charges to pay for the lines and maintenance, and supply charges for the power generation. Both are per kW, like 3cents delivery plus 15cents supply. Plus a couple of fees and sales tax.
Are you saying that someone who uses 10kWh of grid power per month should pay the same “connection fee” as someone who uses 990kWh per month?
No, they’re arguing that the price of power should be split:
- A fee for grid maintenance (equal for all)
- A fee per unit of consumed power (scales linearly with consumption)
This makes sense, because regardless of you much power someone uses, the costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure that allows them to draw any power at all remain the same. This also happens to be the model used in Norway, so it’s not an untested concept.
Another option, relevant when the cost of building the power plant is large and the cost of energy production is negligible, is that everyone connected to the grid pays a near-flat fee in total, which is distributed among consumers depending on how much power they use. I’ve never heard of that option being used before.
Assuming both of those people use exactly the same infrastructure (which they do), yes.
The person with the higher usage will still pay more in total because the connection fee is just a base price, you’re still paying per kWh (which is forwarded to the companies running the power stations)
Ok, so, you’re in a neighborhood. You and 100 neighbors are ea
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